


Memory Like a Knife

by vials



Category: Smiley's People - John Le Carré
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, lots of headcanons you're welcome, mentions of Bill anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-09 02:24:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15257328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: Smiley and Karla have a lot to talk about while Karla is at Sarratt, and Smiley realises he can still be surprised.





	Memory Like a Knife

They had to walk more slowly in the winter, when the weather was cold and wet and the chill that had settled into Karla’s bones in exile really made itself apparent. Smiley could tell it frustrated him, even though he gave no indication of the fact – there was simply something resentful about the way Karla would slow his pace when the temperature dropped; something stiff about his movements. Perhaps that was why he didn’t seem to mind Smiley as a walking partner. Smiley wasn’t exactly the speediest person himself, approaching – as Ann had so kindly put it once – being as wide as he was tall. 

It was the time of year where the trees made a half-hearted effort at changing colour, and then one of the winter windstorms would come and tear all the leaves away before they really had the chance. A few stragglers clung to the branches, but most of the leaves were underfoot now, soggy and slippery and sending up a breath of damp air with every step. They had walked in silence for some time, and even only a stone’s throw from the huts at Sarratt it was silent, as though they were the only ones there. The perimeter fence was invisible through the trees, even now they were bare, and Smiley supposed it could be quite quaint if one didn’t know they were there. 

He wondered if Karla had somehow grown smaller. Smiley was sure that he hadn’t shrunk with old age, stooping like so many people do when they reach their later years, but at the same time he seemed smaller somehow. He wasn’t that much skinner, Smiley didn’t think, but he did seem to smoke more than he ate, and his presence had shrunk to the point that Smiley had to keep glancing over to make sure that the man was still walking beside him; with the breeze catching the smoke and spiriting it away, Smiley could momentarily convince himself he was alone. 

“The security is good here,” Karla said, unprompted; they were still quite alone. 

“I suppose it has to be,” Smiley replied amicably, though despite himself his mind went to matters to the contrary – there had been some blood spilt on Sarratt’s soil, and that much was undeniable. 

“You treat all prisoners this well?” Karla asked. “Or just the special ones?”

“Well, we don’t go in for any heavy-handedness, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“There are some people who would think that strange,” Karla said, taking a final drag of his cigarette and dropping it to the floor, pausing to press his foot down on it. “After all, a war is a war.”

“The fact it’s a war doesn’t change the fact that such methods are ineffective,” Smiley replied, “as I’m sure you must know.”

“People will say anything to stop the pain, yes?” 

“Something like that.”

“Or perhaps they are just weak characters.” Karla’s tone was inscrutable, as it often was. Smiley never knew if the man was confessing something or trying to antagonise him. He supposed it was better than the silence, though. Anyway was better than that. “Perhaps they just have no self-respect.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Smiley replied neutrally. “I’ve been fortunate to avoid such treatment.”

“Not everybody talks,” Karla said, already patting his pockets for his cigarette pack. “Some people, they stay silent. They have nothing to confess to, and even if they know the suspicions will remain, they say nothing. If they are going to be shot as an innocent man, they want to ensure that their signature is not on any documents.” He found the packet, sliding a cigarette out. “It’s a shame. They forge the signatures afterwards anyway.”

Smiley gave a small frown. “Remarkable that you protected such a regime.”

“There is always a bigger picture,” Karla said, pausing again to light the cigarette. Smiley noted that he had a cheap lighter now, probably dug up from one of the junk boxes when he had arrived. It was odd to miss the flash of gold in Karla’s hand as he lit the cigarette; strangely Smiley almost missed it, but at the same time he didn’t feel any discomfort when he thought about the gold lighter, now probably a carefully hidden souvenir for whoever had come across it. “There are things that ordinarily you might not want to do, but you do it because there is something more at stake. You keep doing so until priorities change. You keep protecting the bigger picture.”

“And suddenly there was a bigger picture than the regime,” Smiley said. “Suddenly Tatiana was the bigger picture.”

“I would rather be known as a defector,” Karla said, putting the lighter away, “than to be known as somebody who acted foolishly for love.”

“I thought you Russians were all about that,” Smiley said. “I’ve heard the Russian soul is quite romantic at heart.”

“The Russian soul might be,” Karla said, “but the Soviet soul is not. Besides, even if that were not the case I would find the whole thing ridiculous. It is ridiculous. But we cannot help such things.”

“Tatiana will be well looked after,” Smiley assured him. “She will be in no danger.”

“The biggest danger to her is herself. Such a rogue spirit. Sometimes I wondered if I shouldn’t have had her adopted out to the West.” Karla took a long drag from the cigarette, and for a moment Smiley saw something harden in his gaze, as though he were privately admonishing himself for something. “But it was a risk. Should it ever get out that I had a child in the West, I would have been finished. Still, I think she would have fared better here. She had too free a spirit to live under such a regime. If she had been an ordinary citizen she would have died in the gulag.”

“But she had friends in high places,” Smiley said. “Or, should I say, a friend.”

“So many ridiculous risks taken for that girl,” Karla said, shaking his head. “I should have known it would come to something like this. But I have to say that I never expected that you would catch on to what was happening. I suppose that was my greatest mistake. I underestimated you – something I should have never done.”

“You got careless, Karla,” Smiley said. “I think if you had been up to your usual standard of work, I would never have known.”

“Ah, but it’s difficult to keep to that standard when you’re going behind the backs of almost everyone you know,” Karla said, sounding almost amused. “I had to scrape the barrel, as I’m sure you noticed. It was a last resort. He died near here, didn’t he?”

The change of subject was so abrupt that Smiley took a moment to reorient himself. He quickly caught up, when he realised where they were – strange, he hadn’t been walking to this area in particular, and he wondered, perhaps paranoid, if Karla had somehow steered them here himself. 

“Yes,” he eventually said. “He was found propped up by that tree. His neck was broken.” 

“Remind me,” Karla said, “what was the official story again?”

“He was found with an empty bottle of vodka,” Smiley said, reciting the story easily. “A large one, for that matter. It seemed he had drunk the entire thing himself and taken a bad fall.”

“And then propped himself up against a tree?”

“The drag marks in the dirt indicate he may have been alive for a short while and unaware of how serious his wound was. Some people think that he might have furthered the damage to his neck by trying to move himself.”

“But you don’t think that, do you?”

“No,” Smiley admitted, “I don’t.”

“I was thinking of taking the deal,” Karla said, pausing in the small clearing and watching the tree as he spoke, almost as someone would while reminiscing at a grave. “Sometimes I wish I had had the chance. It was a farfetched thing, but I was hoping I could do it. In all my worrying about Tatiana, I was considering marrying her off to Bill one day.”

Smiley wasn’t often surprised enough to register it on his face, but this was one of the exceptions. He felt his eyes widen slightly, and for a moment it felt so surreal he was sure he had heard him wrong. He cleared his throat, and couldn’t help a small chuckle. “Marry her to Haydon? Surely you can’t think that would have worked.”

“I didn’t know,” Karla admitted, “but it would have been easy. Bill would have done anything I asked, and he would have treated her well, I’m quite sure of that. I would have set them up somewhere remote, once Bill had finished with the usual theatrics that abound whenever a Western defector first arrives in Moscow – all song and dance and parades for a year, and then obscurity. The two of them could have lived far away, out of the public eye, and Tatiana would be out of danger. Nobody would touch the wife of a Hero of the Soviet Union. It would have been the best case scenario, from what I could see, and I did a lot of thinking about it.”

Smiley suddenly realised something. “Did Bill know about Tatiana?”

“Of course he did,” Karla said, this time stooping to press the cigarette out on the ground. He remained crouched for a moment and then stood up slowly and, from what Smiley could tell, with no small amount of discomfort. 

“For how long?”

“Since she was born, of course,” Karla replied. “We have known one another for a long time. He even met her, when she was a very small child.”

“That is a lot of trust to place in an agent, Karla,” Smiley said, almost scolding. “Not to mention highly unprofessional. What if Haydon had talked? What if he had been turned? You would have been finished before you began.”

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Smiley,” Karla said, “but out of the two of us I feel I have always known Bill a lot better than you. Perhaps better than anyone in his life. I had no reason to doubt that he would keep the secret, and he did. Not a word to anyone. Not even to me, unless I brought the subject up first. The only time he ever came to me about it was shortly after her mother’s death, when I had not a clue what to do with her. He offered to take her back with him and say she was his orphaned bastard. I almost let him, but decided it would be too risky.”

It was a thought too surreal for words. Smiley imagined how that would have gone; how, risks and all, Haydon would have gotten away with it. The fact that he had no small number of bastards was not a secret, and as far as Smiley knew, he had a reputation for looking after them at least financially. People would be scandalised but not overly shocked if Haydon had returned with a small child and set her up with a nanny and a good boarding school – no one would think it was out of character. Smiley had of course seen Tatiana and knew that no one would have ever dreamed that she could be Karla’s child – she was slight and small and wore his frown, but in appearance and colouring she was obviously her mother’s child. 

Ann would have doted on her, Smiley thought. The two of them had never had children, and as far as he knew, never wanted them, but Ann would have adored Tatiana, being able to play with her and not have any of the real responsibility, a little girl to dress up and show off. Smiley had the harrowing thought that he would be totally unaware: Haydon and Ann talking in the drawing room, Ann at her little letter-writing desk, Haydon lounging on the floor, and Tatiana – Karla’s _child_ – running riot around the house. It frustrated Smiley to know he would be none the wiser. Perhaps it even angered him. 

“Yes,” he eventually said, after a pause that was too long. “I suppose it would be.”

“You don’t like that idea, do you?” Karla asked, and his voice sounded on the verge of laughing. “Bill and Ann were so close, I suppose it would have been inevitable that you would have met the child.”

“It’s a very odd situation to envision,” Smiley said, putting it mildly. 

“The two of them were very close, no?” Karla asked. “Perhaps a little too close for most people’s liking.”

“So I’ve heard,” Smiley said, and Karla looked at him, something glittering in his eyes that might have been endearing if not for the context. “Did you think I forgot? It was quite a hinge for your plan, wasn’t it? And yes, I suppose it worked. I guess that means we’re on even footing when it comes to underestimating one another.”

“So many schemes,” Karla said, almost fondly, “and here we are. I suppose it was inevitable that one of us would eventually outplay the other.”

“Perhaps we would have kept outmanoeuvring one another until one of us died,” Smiley said. “After all, if it hadn’t been for some uncharacteristically sloppy behaviour, it might just have ended that way.”

“I’m not as young as I used to be, Smiley.”

“No,” Smiley said, “you were old when I met you.”

Karla gave a hint of a smile and turned back to the tree. In the sudden silence, Smiley could hear the last of the leaves settling.


End file.
